Turning Paradoxes on Their Heads

Academia has a tendency to turn what’s playful and fun into something dead serious. This is particularly clear when it comes to paradoxes.

Paradoxes as philosophy

Instead of seeing paradoxes as fun ways to play around with logic, academics use them as serious exercises in philosophy. No longer can we laugh at the absurdities that flawed logic can lead us too. Instead, we have to entertain the idea that this is in fact how thing are.

Schrödinger’s cat

Back in 1935, Erwin Schrödinger demonstrated for the Copenhagen School of quantum mechanics that their logic had a serious flaw in it. He pointed out that their interpretation would result in the absurd notion that an unobserved animal, like a cat, can be both dead and alive at the same time.

However, the response to this was not what Schrödinger had expected. Instead of a serious rethink of their interpretations, the Copenhagen School took the paradox as proof of superior logic.

Speaking on behalf of the Copenhagen school, Niels Bohr made the astonishing statement that what’s going on at the atomic level is beyond comprehension, and can only be understood by the application of math.

Red flags

Paradoxes which have always been used as red flags for flawed logic were turned on their heads. Instead of red flags, they are now considered proof of superior logic.

This has in turn stopped theoretic science dead in its tracks. With nothing to hold us back from exploring dead ends, the amount of time wasted on flawed theories has been immense.

Niels Bohr

By The American Institute of Physics credits the photo [1] to AB Lagrelius & Westphal, which is the Swedish company used by the Nobel Foundation for most photos of its book series Les Prix Nobel. – Niels Bohr’s Nobel Prize biography, from 1922, Public Domain, Link